Avamere Rehabilitation of Beaverton is where I spent three weeks doing rehab. It gets high marks from me, and I wanted to post a report so that anyone googling can find it.

I suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed my left side, just after my 59th birthday. When I arrived there, I wasn't really able to walk, and my left hand was mostly useless. When I left 18 days later, I walked out (with a cane) and I had regained the ability to type, among many other things.

I would never have believed I could recover so much, so fast. I had speech therapy, occupational therapy, and physical therapy, totaling about three hours per day, and the therapists were generally excellent. They were all women, for some reason, and they worked for a sister company.

And they helped me enormously. It seemed like every day, I'd wake in the morning and realize that I had another thing back. For instance, one day I regained the ability to lift my left ring finger, which I couldn't use before that. Two days after that I was able to type again.

The nurses were generally very nice and caring. As in all such facilities they never responded to the call button as fast as you'd really want, but they did come, and they were always nice and helpful.

The food was generally pretty good, as institutional food goes. We always got meat for lunch and dinner (or chicken or fish, animal protein). They published a menu, and if you didn't like something there was a standard set of alternatives you could pick, if you put in a form in time. I found the "Beaverton Club" to be a good choice for an alternate. The meals didn't always fill me up, but it was OK to have snacks. (I had some cookies I ate for that reason.)

Like any nursing home, there were a few patients who were creepy as hell, but generally I was able to steer clear of them. Many of the rooms are doubles, but there are a lot of single rooms, too, and I recommend getting one of them if you can.

I was there in November and the weather was vicious, so I only went outside once. But there are patios which can be used when weather is nice.

If I had any complaint, it was the beds. A place like that always has a percentage of patients who can't control bowel or bladder, so the mattresses are covered in plastic. The beds are very narrow, and the sheets slide easily over the mattresses, and the first night I felt like I was going to slip off and fall on the floor. After that, I slept on top of the coverlet, which gave me more friction.

Obviously I was happy to leave and get back home again, but I found my stay to be very pleasant, and extremely encouraging and helpful. They treated me well, and helped me enormously. A big thumbs up!

UPDATE: Also! The place had five wifi nodes for guests to use. I had a computer while I was there and was able to browse the internet to keep myself entertained, since I don't watch TV.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 10:11 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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